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An American Man’s Quest to Become an Old Castilian

The village of Guzmán in northern Spain.Credit
Andrea Frazzetta/LUZPhoto, for The New York Times

The A-1 national highway in Spain heads north from Madrid straight over the Guadarrama Mountains, the peaks jutting like jagged shark teeth that cut the rest of the world away. And then you’re floating, up through one last ear-popping puerta, or pass, perched above the upper Meseta Central, the football-shaped highlands that cover most of the country’s northern interior, the silted land below glinting with flecks of red, gold and green.

In that moment, you’re no longer American, or anything at all. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the entire flow of history illuminate that stage: megaraptors skittering after prey; savage packs of prehumans hoarding meat; the Romans building their roads across Hispania, and the Visigoths plotting and conniving; and, after them, the marauding Moors and marauding Christians, pillaging in the name of Allah, God or chivalry; and then the huge, undulating flocks of sheep, whose wool became a source of Spain’s wealth in the 15th and 16th centuries, spurring the grand imperialistic designs of Isabella and Ferdinand that brought the first caravels to the New World . . . and so on.

Harsh and given to extreme weather, the meseta of Castile isn’t exactly Tuscany or Provence. It doesn’t welcome a traveler with the same fecundity and open arms. From a tourist’s perspective, it’s a little like visiting South Dakota. You can drive miles on the meseta wondering if you’ve landed on the most lonesome patch of flash-baked clay in the world — past an abandoned car in a field, past a single tree in an ocean of nothingness — and then from a far hill comes the outline of a church tower, the silhouette of a castle (the reason that this land is called Castile), the clustered homes packed tightly together against what the wild night might bring.

On my first visit to the area more than a decade ago, I spun off the highway at Aranda de Duero and headed northwest through vineyards and sunflower fields, looking for a village I’d only heard about — a place called Guzmán (population: 80). I asked for directions in one small town from a group of old men wearing black berets on a shaded bench, then proceeded lost for half an hour, eventually cloverleafing back to that same exact spot. Finally, I found a thin serpentine road that narrowed as I drove, leading upward again.

And suddenly: tiny Guzmán on its hill, its skyline a cubist jumble but for the bell tower of the church and the square turrets of the palacio, as the 17th-century manor house is known. Some of the houses were so decrepit they appeared split open, as if by the fist of a giant. You could see a strewn book, someone’s bloomers, artifacts of a lost life. Let there be no doubt, time had had its way here. You might have looked upon this place — and its detritus — and moved right along.

But something happened to me. Even now, I’m not exactly sure what. I have a friend who once told me about the first time he ever took a ferry to an island off the coast of North Carolina, and how he knew, right there on the ferry — with the salt spray and the light off the ocean — that he’d come back to this same spot every year. He’d come to relive that feeling of leaving his old self behind. That annual renewal, the reacquaintance with the person he felt himself to be on that island, was something he wanted to organize his life around. Similarly, Guzmán instantly and improbably became my place. It made no sense, practically speaking. Even if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, or if I spoke Spanish, or didn’t have a baby at home, it wouldn’t have made sense. And that was part of its tug too. I was certain this town had secrets to tell — and that maybe my best self was there to be found. Sometimes, travel is this elemental: the desire to replace the old molecules with new ones, familiarity with its opposite. To find the kingdom on the hill and stand in awe in its gold-paved streets, even if those streets are strewn, as Guzmán’s were, with sheep poo.

You may be reading this on a beach right now. Or in a cabin in the woods. You may be visiting at a friend’s cottage. Or you’ve just returned from Montauk, the Adirondacks, Tuscany. Maybe you’re packing to go, checking a list (bathing suits, fishing rods, novels), waiting to board a plane, anticipating what has been a year in the offing: your summer vacation.

It’s possible you’ve found your “place,” too, the one to which you return, however temporarily, however near or far. When I was a kid, my family made an annual August pilgrimage to Cape Cod, where we rented a cottage in a little colony that brought the same families back each year. For that week, sometimes two, my father didn’t commute or wear a suit and tie to his job, didn’t wash the cars or regrout the shower on weekends, or sit at his desk on Sunday afternoon, paying bills, listening to opera. My mother didn’t have to pack lunches or crisscross the county with her four sons, ferrying us to practices and music lessons and school events.

Even at the time, I realized my parents were somehow different on vacation, airier and at ease, youthful in their goofiness and laughter, more attentive of us — and each other — for during that one time of year, we mostly had ourselves, without distraction.

There were familiar vacation rites, too: the Sunfish we rented, the board games we played, the custard stand we walked the sandy road to each night. During the day, my father sailed with us, played football on the beach with us, swam with us. We, his sons, would ride his back into the piling waves.

What I now realize as a parent myself is just how much was really at stake on those getaways. And what inordinate disappointment could be evoked if things went wrong. I understand now how desperate my parents, like all parents, really were to “get away,” to hit reset and slip into new skins again — and then bring those people back in the Ford LTD station wagon with us. They talked about their hopes. They read the Cape real estate fliers, dreaming of ownership. And it was sort of the same with us kids: we banded together, arguing less, wore sailor hats bought at some taffy shop, found ourselves jumping off the dunes with other kids from other families. And the picture-taking was another cue: this was who we were on vacation — happy, absorbed, alive — lest anyone forget.

And then, it was over.

At the end of the vacation, on the last night, we always built the same U.F.O. Two thin pieces of wood nailed into an X, candles affixed to the crossbeams. A plastic dry-cleaning bag was attached at the four points of the X. The candles were lighted, filling the bag with hot air, and then the whole thing rose and was blown out to sea, all of us onshore watching it go.

Even the next day, as our packed station wagon followed the jammed highways home, I kept envisioning that U.F.O. aloft, off the coast, over an island, alighting in some foreign country, England, maybe, where everyone wore Beefeater costumes and said, “Pip, pip!” I remember my childish defiance, and having a thought that would return to me over and over as an adult, though now that small loss was connected to a much larger one. The question was: Who says this has to end?

How I came to touch down in Guzmán, Spain — and to think of it as the place where there would be no end — is, like all good travel stories, a tale of going in search of one thing and finding something else, of what happens when you become the U.F.O. and allow yourself to float away.

In 1991, I picked up some part-time work proofreading a monthly newsletter at Zingerman’s Delicatessen, an exalted foodie haven in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the rabid clientele lined up early on football Saturdays to buy their corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. In that era before we could carry on deep conversations about the virtues of Humboldt Fog versus Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, the newsletter was a gourmand’s playground — and an argonaut’s, too. Ari Weinzweig, the author and one of the deli owners, spanned the globe finding unusual and delicious victuals — and the newsletter was packed with culinary stories and histories. October of that year turned out to be “Spanish celebration month” at the deli, and the newsletter sang the praises of various olive oils, sherry vinegars and Sephardic Jewish cooking, but there was one entry that seemed most remarkable, about a unique, otherwise anonymous Spanish cheese called Páramo de Guzmán. Until that time, it was the most expensive cheese the deli had ever sold, a house cheese from Castile that tilted toward Manchego. “Rich, dense, intense,” Weinzweig wrote. “The result is . . . sublime.”

According to Weinzweig, it was entirely handmade from an old family recipe, by a farmer from the small village of Guzmán named Ambrosio Molinos. He produced the cheese from the milk of his herd of Churra sheep, in a stable across from the house in which he was born (and his father before that, and his father before that). Ambrosio cut the curd into very small pieces, a time-consuming process that increased the density of the cheese, then aged it in a cave for up to a year, eventually drenching it in olive oil. In keeping with its idiosyncratic, outsider status, the cheese came sealed in a white tin.

At that time, I was monastically broke, too broke in my mind to try even a smidgen of this cheese, but I did rip out and save that four-paragraph entry, and nearly a decade later, in the year 2000, working as a magazine writer, I carried that ripped piece of paper on assignment to Spain, where I went to profile the futurist chef Ferran Adrià, whose culinary innovations and 30-course meals, each new dish served in three-minute intervals, seemed to embody the digital speed of our times.

On that trip, I had Sunday off, so I flew from Barcelona to Madrid, then drove up the gut of Castile and back in time to the cheesemaker’s village of Guzmán. It was a lark, perhaps, but it was also a pilgrimage of sorts, my adult self enacting a dream of my younger, poorer self, to try that fabled cheese in that little Castilian village. As I drove, the radio reported more Basque bombings, and the day was so hot, the car tires actually began to melt on the pavement.

I found Ambrosio in the cool of his family cave, or bodega, the place where he aged his cheese. In Guzmán, there existed two dozen or so caves burrowed in the hill that marked the village’s northern boundary. Some of the bodegas were said to date back as far as the Roman occupation of Spain. In a time long past, the fruits of the harvest were brought to the caves and stored — grain, apples and, in particular, cheese and wine, the latter transported in casks made from cured goat carcasses — to be accessed during the harsh winter and spring. Legend had it that a man would sit in a room built above the cave and itemize what went down into the cellars, to report it all back to the lord of the land. This room became known as el contador, or the counting room.

As the families in the village built or inherited bodegas, they also added to these counting rooms, sometimes sculpturing a foyer and perhaps stairs that led up to a cramped, cozy warren that included a fireplace. Soon, people gathered at the bodega to share meals around a table and pass the time. And as the centuries unfolded and the caves came to serve a purpose less utilitarian than social, the room took on the other definition of contar, “to tell.” The contador, then, became a “telling room.” It was the place where, on cold winter nights or endless summer days, drinking homemade red wine and eating chorizo, villagers traded their secrets, histories and dreams. In this way, the bodega, with its telling room, became a mystical state of mind as much as a physical place, connecting the people here to their past.

At that first meeting in the telling room, over the course of eight hours, Ambrosio told me a fantastical story. He was a hulking man with mournful eyes. His voice rumbled along, seemingly without breath. Working closely with his mother, he claimed to have recovered the old family recipe (it hadn’t been written anywhere, of course), and when the villagers first tried that Molinos cheese, they found it so good that they were transported back to their own mothers’ kitchens. As the cheese was passed along, more and more people fell under its sway, until a cheesemonger from Madrid began to sell it in the capital. From there the legend grew: Páramo de Guzmán was sold at Harrods in London, won medals at cheese fairs, and later arrived at Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. It was said to have been served to the Spanish and British royal families, to Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra. Julio Iglesias was a fan, and Fidel Castro liked it so much, he tried to buy Ambrosio’s entire stock.

As the demand for Páramo de Guzmán increased, it was nearly impossible for Ambrosio to keep pace — milking, boiling, harping the curd, cutting it in fine pieces, etc. — and now there were complicated business concerns imposed on what had, at first, been a very simple act of creation. As Ambrosio unspooled the story that day in his telling room, he said he’d asked his best friend from childhood, a corporate lawyer named Julián Mateos, to help him with the logistical complications of a growing operation, and to help him finance a move to a new cheese factory in a nearby village. Somewhere in all of the expansion plans, Ambrosio, the bohemian creator, claimed (though I would later find out that this claim was contested by Julían with equal insistence) to have been duped, tricked into signing his name to a contract and relinquishing ownership of the company.

That is, he’d actually had his cheese stolen.

So, no, I wasn’t going to get a chance to try it, Ambrosio said bitterly. Because he no longer made the cheese.

And then he said he was plotting to murder his best friend. For that seemed the only fitting thing to do.

There was more, of course. As compelling as the legend of the cheese was (had I really walked into the middle of a murder plot?), and despite the fact that my pilgrimage to eat Páramo de Guzmán had been stymied, I was riveted by something else, something that illuminated a deeper need I hadn’t identified before. Ambrosio spoke with such authority, stood so stubbornly in opposition to the world I lived in, that I could feel him lifting me, however momentarily, from the unceasing current of my other life to the shore of his. His words were prophetic, aphoristic, instructive, bawdy, hilarious. He was an amazing storyteller. (I knew this because my friend Carlos had accompanied me there to help translate it all.)

I left and then came back again, three months later, having roped another friend into playing translator, to make sure Guzmán and Ambrosio were real. There was the village, in its worn, November splendor, the wide, empty fields stretching away in robes of ermine and gray — and Ambrosio was exactly as I found him the first time, salt of the Castilian earth, adding more axioms to what he called his filosofía grandísima.

“The problem with modern life is that nobody knows how to defecate anymore,” he said. “This is the most important thing.” Then he held forth on the topic for an hour.

“Divinity, not machines,” he said at one point, referring to the need for people to raise their animals with care and love, instead of leaving it to the brutal regime of industrial meat farms.

“Pigs need to eat beautiful acorns,” he said. “And you need to converse with your chickens.” He talked about how the impersonal machinery of modernity had destroyed the values and sensitivities, the tenderness and powerful connection that came from living close to the earth.

I couldn’t get enough of this. I returned to Guzmán again — and again — making excuses at home, cashing in frequent-flier miles or using work as a way to jump the Atlantic, with a side trip to the village. And there I sat for any cluster of days I could get, up in the telling room, like a toadstool, passively absorbing every conversation. The more Ambrosio talked, the more I realized that perhaps I hadn’t ever known what I really yearned for. He was sunk into the here and now, while I seemed to spend a great deal of time in my deadline life racing through airports, a processed cream-cheese bagel in hand, trying to reach the future. But here in the telling room, I sat noticing everything, infused with mindfulness: the pallor of light, the still life of the smooth glass porrón — the device from which wine was drunk here — on the grooved wooden table, the oversize man sitting in his shadow, occasionally revealed at angles or by the rumble or ragged passion in his voice.

In Guzmán, where everyone was so welcoming, I didn’t feel like a dope for taking the unironic view, or stopping to say hello to the old women who swept out their houses each morning, and then pantomiming the rest. I stood in the middle of a sunflower field at midnight, and it wasn’t weird at all. I could hear the hum of stars under that huge Castilian sky, and located the sound of myself thinking. How long had it been since I’d had that kind of clarity or peace? Standing there, I had — call it what you will — a fibrillation of insight, or a crumb-size epiphany.

The intervening voice was simple, almost corny, for it felt so good: Belong to this. But to what — a sunflower patch? Or the silence of the Old World? And did I already belong, or was I supposed to belong, aspire to belong, change my life to belong?

Guzmán: The old people here walked so slowly, they seemed to move backward. Besides a handful who worked in the fields, it was hard to tell if anyone had jobs, or deadlines. There was only spotty cell coverage, so eventually I turned off my phone altogether. Besides a bar, there were no stores to speak of (except one bakery run out of Marcos and Elena’s house), so money, at least in the town itself, was mostly useless. In conversation, the people constantly invoked the past, and so it was mashed up in and intertwined with the present.

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At first you might have thought everyone here had short-term memory loss, but it was a rat-a-tat adaptation that captured the circularity of life in a small village and a reminder that, though very much alone and seemingly shipwrecked in the world, these sun-scorched orphans of Castile could at least depend upon seeing one another one more time.

On the wall of my office back home, I pinned a photograph of Ambrosio. Though I’d taken it myself, it looked as if it could have been from a hundred years ago. During our first visit, he led me down 13 steps beneath the earth, to a close, tight space, clean and dry and well ventilated, with PVC pipe running to the surface for air. The floor and walls were stone, and several electric bulbs hung from the ceiling. Along one wall was makeshift wooden shelving where his world-famous Páramo de Guzmán was once kept. Now the planks sat empty. Back in the left corner was a cubby with more rickety shelves where the family stored its homemade wine in unlabeled green bottles. Even as Ambrosio talked on and on, he ducked into the corner, rummaged a little and returned with an old wooden box. A handgun perhaps, to kill his old friend? Bilbo’s ring? He unclasped its hook, reached in and lifted out something wrapped in chamois — one white tin emblazoned with the black script and gold medal of the original Páramo de Guzmán, all that remained of Ambrosio’s grand cheese experiment, of the greatest thing he’d created in his life.

I asked if he’d let me take a picture. He pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the cave and sat, holding the tin in one hand and the oversize key to the bodega in the other. He gazed directly into the camera, conveying measures of pride and sadness, nonchalance and seriousness. In explaining the cave’s former function as a storehouse, Ambrosio had conjured “the Old Castilian,” the mythic figure in this land who planted and scythed wheat by hand, who endured hailstorms that, in a blink, might viciously erase a year’s work in the vineyards. The Old Castilian was guided by a chivalrous code long past, never buckling under the failures heaped upon him by nature or relenting in the face of the enemy. He carried those heavy casks of wine up to the caves on his shoulders, singing a jota, where they were counted by the man in the telling room.

Meanwhile, there I sat in my attic, tallying — words on the page, hours until deadline, measly amounts in the college fund. I sat attached to my machines, typing to keep my editors at bay, forfeiting time, staring at the photograph of Ambrosio, day after day. How to explain what it made me feel? It went beyond yearning now. Was it discontentment, the creep of some low-level depression? It was 2002. The world was at war, and I pitched a book proposal about Ambrosio Molinos and his cheese — about betrayal and revenge and happiness — so I’d have a reason to go back to the village. When it sold, I did.

Instead of taking my kids to Disney World, I brought them to Guzmán. For my “job.” Instead of meeting my mom in some bucket-list destination a mother has spent a life dreaming of, I made her come to Guzmán too. Thankfully, my wife loved the place as much as I did. We had another baby, and in the summer of 2003, we rented a house there. Our little girl took her first steps in Guzmán, and uttered her first words, agua and hola. Our son, walking through the streets one day in the Yankees batting helmet he never took off, was surrounded by sheep heading out to graze on the páramo, and the look on his face in that sheep cloud — two parts astonishment, one part Daaaaad? — is one a father never forgets.

In the telling room, I heard the legends, about the great Castilian knight El Cid, and the Spanish Civil War, about the local scandals and triumphs and a man who actually flew over the village one night, called to flight by the bones of his grandfather. There was Fernando, neatly dressed in chinos and polo shirt, who stood beneath the tree across the street from the church and never uttered a word. There was Crees, the stonemason, who had vowed that, if by the age of 40, he wasn’t a millionaire, he’d only do the minimum work required to feed himself, spending his days sculpturing naked women from stone in his studio in the fields.

Was this a Gabriel García Márquez novel? Anything seemed possible in Guzmán, even that I’d get to eat that last tin of the real Parámo de Guzmán. Every visit became stranger, deeper, more real — until I imagined I belonged. When I asked the mayor in the village — a woman with her own stories — if it seemed weird that I kept coming back, she said, “No, we’re honored.”

Honored? At home, in a melee of diapers and tantrums, sweetness then tossed-over dinners, no one ever said they were especially honored by my presence.

So who were these good people anyway? And how was it that I’d come to need them more than they would ever need me?

Every year we arrive at this, the season of Facebook travel-trills and vacation photos. However envious, I will never say no to viewing my friends’ vacation photos, primarily because one of our tacit promises when we travel is that we’ll bring back a good story — of our heightened state of living and the exaggerated adventures that befell us — and hope to let others live vicariously through it.

In Guzmán, I wanted the story to last. I wanted to freeze my life inside of it — and that of my family — for as long as possible. No matter what the speed of our American days, no matter how quickly we grew and aged, we’d always have that out-of-time Castilian village on its hill.

As delusional as this false everlastingness was, it gave me unreasonable comfort for some reason. And I had help in prolonging things, from Ambrosio himself. After telling his story of the cheese, he became less interested in talking about the various complicated aspects of it. “Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good day by going over that again?” he asked.

Exactly! There was time to revisit the legend of Páramo de Guzmán some other day. But first, I was happy to follow him out to the fields where he irrigated the crops. Or to help him harvest the grapes. Or to cruise from bar to bar, and town to town, meeting his friends. Here was Pinto, who made the best rabo estofado, or oxtail stew, from his mother’s old recipe — and the Cristóbal brothers, who served the best roast suckling lamb. Here was Luís, who created antique keys patterned after ones he’d dug out of ruins — of nickel and brass and gold plate, some jointed or with fantastically ornate handles — though they opened no doors, for the doors they might have opened were all gone, lost to history.

If Ambrosio’s story was a Slow Food tale gone awry, then what I was doing was Slow Reporting, Slow Thinking, Slow Storytelling, Slow Living. I was doing, I believed, what we all want to do, which is find a way to capture things before they dissolve, to not lose our lives to the relentless pace that keeps us from knowing who we are and what we want.

Not everyone was so charmed by my embrace of the Slow.

I missed the contracted deadline for my book — and then, having been granted a two-year extension, I missed that one too. Soon, I found myself like Pluto, downgraded from planet to icy rock, orbiting erratically, elliptically. I tried everyone’s patience, even that of my wife, who never once doubted the necessity of Guzmán — as a place and an idea — in our lives. But now we’d had our third child, and the book advance had evaporated long ago. And she had a career, too.

At my lowest, I was full of self-chastisements: Why did you ever believe any good might come from chasing a piece of cheese? I couldn’t quite square my incomplete attempts to bring Guzmán vividly to life on the page with my attempts at reimagining my own life.

I have another friend who begins his annual vacation in Kiawah with a flurry of text messages — a close-up of the sweating gin-and-tonic on the porch railing, a sunrise beach stretching to some infinity — including triumphal, goading lines like, “Still snowing in Maine?” or “You hit that deadline?” But then, after the first few days, something else begins to happen. The photos are no longer of, say, the perfectly grilled sea bass, or some other marker of his escape, but of his kids. His messages grow forlorn: “Three more days . . . might as well pack up now.” “What am I doing with my life?” And always, from the airport before flying home: “I’m dying.” It’s a joke, of course, but the truth too — and it’s what I was feeling after my protracted time in Guzmán.

I fell into inertia and frustration. I was struck by a Slow Epiphany that the real hindrance to writing this book was that all books, like life, eventually have an end. There’s a last sentence, concluding with the report of a bullethole period. And then we float into white space.

Somehow the one thing I hadn’t considered was that when this story was fully told, then the trip would be over — and I would render myself locked out.

Which is sort of what happened. Though not entirely. The story got told, and Guzmán gave me more in that regard — stories to tell — than any place I’ve ever gone or, I imagine, will ever go. I continued to wish I could find any excuse to go there, to sit with Ambrosio in the telling room one more time. But it was harder to justify now. My kids were getting bigger. Life here was intervening. We went as a family one last time.

The Guzmán of all these years later was now a place where there were modern streetlights (gack!), a refurbished palacio with actual hotel rooms (but who would come?), a seasonal influx of foreign field hands (mostly Romanians and Moroccans) packed into a couple of houses, eating out of a place that had once been a bar. The bar itself had moved three times, for even a tiny village needed its bar, even if it had nothing else. Ambrosio’s beloved father had died — and was buried in the cemetery, where he’d been laid to rest with his head to the south and feet to the north (as opposed to everyone else, who was buried east to west) so that he could keep his eye on the telling room and all the wine drunk there.

Part of coming to the end, then, was allowing it. And coming to an admission: Where the village of Guzmán had been disintegrating on its rise of land that surveyed the meseta, I had harked upon it, Quixote-like, and saw a lush paradise on its witness hill. Where its inhabitants were all dying their own slow deaths — lung cancer from smoking, failed livers from drinking, bodies beaten by farm labor, psyches weighted with sin and grudges — I’d seen a compelling tableau: kindly old men wearing black berets, women cane-clomping with dignity, all concealing light-filled truths within their secret hearts. If someone coughed up half a lung, graphically cursed the creator and spit out some foamy substance at the side of the road, I conceived of it as a sentimental gesture full of hidden meaning. In this world I’d found dusty-booted Ambrosio and fallen in love with the ideal for which he — and his cheese — stood.

I was happy to believe in it, for this is what travel is too: a kind of childlike wonder — and this sort of woozy love that doesn’t contemplate loss — that, when pushed further, becomes life again. There you are, with all your familiar dreams and conflicts, the constant skirmishes between frustration and transcendence, your best and worst selves. However far you go, there you are, with your same fear of mortality, and this deep desire to hold on to your kids forever.

Anyway, I’d like to imagine that Guzmán was in us, that it was no longer only a physical place. Our children remained fondest of stories told out loud. So, our telling rooms were the car, the kitchen, the dinner table. They were the moments after turning out the lights, when we lay next to each other in bed, in whatever combination of parent and child, in tangles of arms and legs, and poured out the last tales of the day in a hush meant to coax sleep but that often provoked the admonition “One more — please?”

At least this was how it felt on the best days, that we could build this little fortress against the crummy things of the world. And I could tell myself that more than a decade spent chasing a piece of cheese had been for a good reason, too. That I’d brought back a new ethos, or an ancient one, and tried to make it work a little in our lives. I still could be seen running through airports with a processed cream-cheese bagel in my hand, but on weekends, it gave me great pleasure to turn off my phone for a while, to be unreachable. At those times, on a soccer sideline, I was randomly struck by the idea that life was loss, there was no escaping it, and so the best I might do, though never with the same flourish as Ambrosio, was to try to plant myself in the here and now.

It was November when we came into the village just before twilight, the sun sinking beneath the ceiling of clouds to light the land, the thin green murk of day giving way to a brilliant golden glow. We drove to the palacio, where we were staying, and when we parked, the children went sprinting off in the direction of the fields, eager to explore and play soccer. My wife and I unloaded the bags and then went ambling along the road down to meet them, one we’d traveled many times that first summer long ago.

There was no one around for this particular homecoming. Not a soul. And perhaps this was most fitting of all. The houses were shuttered, and not a single window was lighted from within. The air was cool and clean. The village was all ours, until we came to the track that led to the Molinos barn.

As we approached, a huge figure loomed over our youngest, talking rapid-fire in that gravelly baritone. Our boy was looking up at him, head cocked, laughing, uncertain what to make of the giant he’d just met in the twilight of a Castilian village thousands of miles from home.

Ambrosio did what he always does, then, afflicted as he is by that great Castilian generosity: He let us in again. He showed the kids his barn, let them drive the huge tractor. He ferried us up to the telling room, and then out in the fields, to his house there, for a late dinner. Driving us back to the palacio, at midnight, he veered to the edge of that serpentine road as it climbed to the village, and then he was out in a vineyard, waving for us to follow. He stood there under a bright moon, with his finger to his lip. “Shhhhh, listen,” he said. “If you listen, the silence has a lot to say.”

The kids were rapt as my wife and I tried to translate, but sinking together into that earth, I had a feeling I’d had at least a hundred times here. It was that feeling of being a child again, of watching the U.F.O., of being told the story that would never die. The kids stood clustered around Ambrosio, as he pointed up the hill to Guzmán.

“I think there’s something a little bit magical about this place,” he said, then drew in a deep breath, and we let it be.

This article is adapted from “The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese,” published by the Dial Press.

Michael Paterniti is a contributor to GQ and the author of “The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese.”